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Fiona Reid's blog

I recently attended the Third Research Software Engineers (RSE) conference in Birmingham, UK. RSE conferences bring together people who work in an RSE-type roll from across the UK and world.

For anyone who doesn’t know, an RSE is typically someone who has expertise in both coding and research but is not necessarily a pure computer programmer or pure researcher. Often RSEs can be the only such person in their department and thus the conference gives them a chance meet other people doing similar roles to share their experiences and help them feel part of a much larger community.

Last week Mario Antoioletti and myself attended the Portobello High School Careers Convention representing EPCC as part of STEMNET. Portobello was my old high school so I was quite keen to go back and see what had changed in the 20+ years since I was last in the assembly hall.

The convention was an opportunity for pupils from S2 (12-13 year olds), S4 (14-15 year olds), S5 (15-16 year olds) and S6 (final year students at 16-17 years old) to explore possible career options with over 30 different businesses, colleges and universities being present. For the pupils from S2, S4 and S5 this event takes place prior to them making their course choices for the next academic year and thus is particularly timely.

The Auditory pilot project investigated the use of HPC to enable faster run times for computational models of the human cochlea. It was a collaboration between EPCC and Dr Michael Newton of the University of Edinburgh’s Acoustics and Audio group.

We began with an existing cochlea model code written in Matlab, which took many hours to run on a single processor. Our initial profiling of the Matlab code showed that almost the entire runtime (see Figure 1) was taken up by this solver and thus any attempts to parallelise the code would require a C/C++ replacement to be found.

On 11th April we held a virtual open day for prospective students for our MSc in High Performance Computing. These open days give an opportunity to find out more about both EPCC and the MSc, the taught courses, the projects, how to apply and any other aspect of studying with us at EPCC. The sessions are online and use a virtual space which enables you to chat (via audio or text) with us.